“Mission Accomplished”

by Nicholas Robinson

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team (Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, and Jeremy Renner) are racing against time to track down a dangerous terrorist named Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), who has gained access to Russian nuclear launch codes and is planning a strike on the United States. An attempt by the team to stop him at the Kremlin ends in a disaster, with an explosion causing severe destruction to the Kremlin and the IMF being implicated in the bombing, forcing the President to invoke Ghost Protocol, under which the IMF is disavowed, and will be offered no help or backup in any form. Undaunted, Ethan and his team chase Hendricks to Dubai and from there to Mumbai, but several spectacular action sequences later, they might still be too late to stop a disaster. – IMDB.com

Starting off what I call “The Ultimate Movie Marathon Dash” (where I watch as many movies from the year as possible in order to give the best Top Ten of the year I can) is the latest installment in the famous Mission Impossible series. I went into this movie with very high expectations (something that tends to not end well for me) from trailers, stills and reviews from the internet. Now, this movie met every single one of them and more. There was great story, amazing action and a wonderful score.

The reason why I think this story is great even though is basically like a lot of action stories out there is the perfect mixture of seriousness, camp and character development. It brought back the style of the first movie but they did it better, made it more entertaining, while still keeping in touch with what Mission Impossible is supposed to be. That was the problem with the 2nd movie. Even though it was a really fun and stylistic action movie with some great sequences (thanks to John Woo) it just didn’t feel like a Mission Impossible movie (if you get what I am saying).

Speaking of action, the action in this movie was AMAZING. From the 1st sequence with Josh Holloway (who I was sad I didn’t get to see more of) to the final fight sequence (and a line that I have been waiting to hear in this entire series just for fun) I was blown away. Brad Bird did an amazing job with the camera and showing off every angle for every scene and it just made me wish that he and JJ Abrams divvy up the rest of the movies because they both did an amazing job with these last two movies and deserve to get full control over it.

Now you can’t talk about Mission Impossible without talking about the stunts and what crazy shit Tom Cruise has been doing. Everybody on the internet knew about Tom Cruise on the outside of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and went “WTF is that dude doing???!!!” and wow was that stunt amazing. I mean when the camera panned showing you how high up he actually was, I started having palpitations. I mean DAMN that thing is high. Anyways Tom Cruise turned up his crazy to 11 and did some really amazing stunts that I am sure when I get the Blu-ray I will just watch over and over again.

One thing I really noticed about that movie that I am sure more than 90% of the people in the theatre didn’t was Michael Giacchino’s superb score for this movie. Sometimes I would find myself tuning out the action noises (car sounds and such) and just listening to that great score. It is one I recommend you get ASAP and listen to it over and over.

Overall, this is a great movie and even though it hasn’t been officially announced, I can’t wait for MI5!!!!